November 2005
A team of Cornell researchers representing three colleges and one of Cornell's Institutes has received the only substantial new grant awarded in the project area in this round of NSF Digital Government Program submissions. At a time when funding cuts had caused the Program to cancel its previous scheduled round of submissions, the 3-year $750,000 grant surprised the team, who credit their success to the multidisciplinary strength they bring to the area.
In addition to principal researchers Claire Cardie, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Information Sciences Program, and Cynthia R. Farina, Professor of Law, the team consists of Thomas R. Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute, and Erica Wagner, Associate Professor of the Hotel School. The project, Natural Language Processing Support for e-Rulemaking, will study sophisticated uses of information technology to help federal agencies manage and monitor the creation of new regulations on the Web.
The team is particularly interested in two areas: making it easier for agency rulewriters to comply with the complex set of legal requirements to apply to creating a rule, and helping the agency manage the increasingly unwieldy public comment process in which stakeholders provide feedback on proposed regulations. In addition, they will study the internal agency process of rulemaking itself, partnering with the Departments of Transportation and Commerce in collecting data on whether and how the Internet is changing that process.
Under compulsion from the E-Government Act, federal agencies are converting the rulemaking process from paper to the Internet. The site www.regulations.gov is to be the single web portal for access to, information about, and participation in the process of publicizing and taking comments on proposed rules -- which is now known as electronic rulemaking (e-rulemaking).
E-rulemaking is supposed to make rulemaking more transparent and accessible to the public, as well as faster, more informative, and more cost-effective for the agency. However, it has become apparent that if the technology is not thoughtfully and proactively used to help the public understand and better participate in the complex rulemaking process, e-rulemaking could frustrate the rulewriter's task by swamping the agency with thousands of relatively uninformed and useless comments that must nonethelss be managed.
The Cornell team will work on these problems by fosuing not only on developing technology-based systems to help rulewriters do their job better, but also on using technology to design a comment interface that helps would be commentors understand how the comment process works, and what the legal and techncal basis of the proposed rule is.
The team's cross-disciplinary composition makes it particularly well-suited for such a project. Farina's specialty is regulatory law; Cardie's expertise is natural language processing techniques and machine learning; Bruce has a decade of conceptual and practical experience in legal informatics; and Wagner's research is on the effect of technological change on organizations. As Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute, remarked: "An important function of the LII is acting as a seedbed for this kind of multidisciplinary activity, and I'm delighted it's bearing fruit. Cornell is one of the very few places where one can find this particular array of expertise and mobilise it to help both government and the public."
NSF apparently agreed. In a year of sharply restricted funding, the Cornell team was one of only two proposals in the e-Rulemaking area to receive a major grant. (Theother team has been working in the area, with NSF support, for several years.) The award recommendation concluded that Cornell's project "is likely to have wide and deep impacts on research and education."
